The film Little Miss Sunshine exemplifies the meaning of "beauty" associated with today's girls' perception of body image. The character Olive is a young girl who participates in beauty pageants because they make her feel important and she likes to win. Her desire to win is often pushed resiliently by her father who is falsely "winning" in his own career when he cannot "score the big deal" that he has been raving about, putting more pressure on the family's financial situation. Olive is not exactly the type of little girl you would associate with competing in beauty pageants and that is what makes the film's message so compelling. Olive has gnarly hair, wears big round grandma glasses, sports a sweatband on her head, is a little chubby, and doesn't have a sense of fashion. Olive is probably the most unique of all the girls she competes against and she never seems to get the message that she is not like the rest of them until the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. The girls who compete at the Little Miss Sunshine pageant are literally under the age of 10 and have fake spray tans of that nasty color orange that many girls in today's society aspire to look like (basically a health hazard in the making). The images of the other girls at the pageant are drastically different than what Olive is portrayed as. Olive becomes discouraged before her performance but realizes that it is what makes her unique that truly makes her a "winner". When she performs her talent everyone in the audience is mortified as she is dancing explicitly to Rick James' "Super Freak", a dance that her recently deceased grandfather had taught her. Olive is thus disqualified from the competition but her moral isn't affected.
This film really shows what the true perception of beauty is in the media today. If beauty wasn't hailed as being tan, blonde, skinny, and covered in makeup and accessories then why would these young girls in the pageants be dressing like future prostitutes of America? The answer is in itself, just look at how the sponge-like minds of today's youth react to the garbage they see and hear.
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